Wearable computing devices continue to increase in popularity, and feature increasingly sophisticated functionality including wireless capabilities. Ubiquitous to this trend are wearable computing devices that offer so-called “natural” input methods such as through gesture recognition. Personal-assistant applications, internet browsing, and general device usage may be partly or entirely controllable by these natural input methods.
One particular application particularly well suited for such natural input includes music generation. For instance, wearable or otherwise portable computing devices may perform gesture recognition to produce/generate musical notes at particular tempos and characteristics (tone, pitch, and so on) relative to the extent of a particular hand or body movement. The musical notes may be pre-recorded notes from a particular instruments (e.g., a piano), or synthesized, depending on a desired sound modality. Thus a user may perform a musical score without necessarily having an instrument, and may seem to generate music “out of thin air.”
However, natural input systems by their nature generally must account for complexities and issues related to the degree of freedom a user has to gesture or otherwise perform body movements. For instance, a simple clapping gesture (e.g., bringing hands together in a rapid motion) may be performed in a variety of different ways by different users, or even by a same user. Thus allowing a high degree of user freedom while also accurately recognizing body movements present numerous non-trivial challenges.
These and other features of the present embodiments will be understood better by reading the following detailed description, taken together with the figures herein described. The accompanying drawings are not intended to be drawn to scale. In the drawings, each identical or nearly identical component that is illustrated in various figures is represented by a like numeral. For purposes of clarity, not every component may be labeled in every drawing.